Designed to handle the ever-growing demands of computer games, today's top GPUs can process information at the rate of nearly two teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion floating-point operations per second).

Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. are packing hundreds of specialized calculating engines on new graphics chips to reach a milestone for speed known as a "teraflop," or a trillion scientific operations per second.

Nvidia today unveiled a system for high-performance computing that uses four graphics processors to provide 1 teraflop of computing power, and multiple units can be easily combined to form a GPU-based computing cluster.

In the area of supercomputing, scientists have coupled together commodity hardware and open source software to build complex systems that have drastically reduced the cost per teraflop for supercomputers.